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We have officially moved all categories into Round 3 for the awards. I am blown away by all the new and amazing music I am hearing across a wide range of categories. I have a big smile on my face right now after finishing my own judging in one small category which I worried was in trouble this year but am actually blown away by the music and it's going to be really brutal to narrow it down to nominees. I can't imagine how difficult it will be to whittle down the really large categories.

We very light once again on Peer judges. I am sure the thousands that helped in the first round are tired. That's why we need a lot of fresh ears to supplement them. And we prefer to have new ears on these categories so we're not just having people re-picking their favorites from last round. If you want to help out, the categories range from a few dozen albums and less than 50 songs to the largest which I think is around 260 albums and 650 songs, give or take. (I haven't actually counted all the categories, so I am not totally sure).

That means we've probably whittled this down from 42K albums and 560K songs to around 8000 albums and probably 20,000 songs and now we have to get it all the way down to around 800 albums and 1800 songs. A fun but heartbreaking process because you get so attached to these songs.

In the category I just finished I was totally stressed that only 8 of my top 12 albums would get a nomination (and that's only if all the other judges agree with me which is unlikely). I bet I have 100 favorite albums in the larger categories to fret over.

We need to get through all this stuff 2 more rounds before we announce the nominees in May. I am not sure we can pull it off and I am a bit worried. So if you're interested and motivated and have some time in the month of April (I did all of one of the small categories in one evening) please help us out!

I realize you are not changing anything for this awards process, but -- I was wondering if you ever considered just putting ALL the songs in one big grab bag and then every judge would get random songs from any genre? Seems like this might work for rounds 1 and 2.

The reason why I ask this is that listening to 100 albums of "College Rock" about killed me and then I started on a genre I decided I didn't really like (after being about 1/2 way through).

Now, of course, folks who like only bluegrass would "select" mostly bluegrass tunes, but I think it would be more interesting to hear all sorts of genres since the criteria is "does it move you". As I type this, I realize this might work for songs -- but not whole albums. So probably you have thought of this before.

What's the scoop for round three -- are there any genres with 50 or less albums?

That would be beyond a trainwreck. People who hate certain types of music forced to wade through 10's of thousands of songs from that genre? Our largest categories are: Rock, Rap, Electronic, Inst. Jazz, M S/S, F S/S and Classical. How many people would be happy to sort through just those? Then add in dabs of Death Metal, Punk, Roots Inst., Klezmer, Techno, Urban Gospel, Experimental etc. etc. etc. (Not to mention the dozens of foreign languages involved in all the ethic categories). People get upset now if a particular genre has certain sub-genres of the category mixed in (like Old R&B and New R&B for example). It would be impossible to get people to spend (already 200,000 hours) on judging stuff they hated.

Terrible idea proven over many years of doing this. If you were stressed by College Rock, which is as unoffensive as pop/rock music comes (that category, for those who don't know, is where we put all the radio friendly mainstream pop/rock bands).

As for Round 3, we're already over half way done with it and hope to be into Round 4 in about 10 days give or take. Things are definitely getting smaller. Still a couple genres with 600+ songs remaing. But we're chopping away significantly at the numbers of albums. Right now the largest album collection moving into Round 4 is about 35, though there's a few large genres still to work on. We'll launch Round 3 part 2 hopefully early next week where everything is cut way way down based on the work that is happening now (combined with the work that previously happened as it all adds up). I even know the actual nominees already in a couple genres for albums because there were very clear cut leaders. Several others will be down to under a dozen albums by next week.

You're missing all the fun. But everyone is welcome to jump in at nominations time when there's only 20 songs and 8 albums in each category.

This is the first stage where "good" or "great" music is being sent home. At the end of this round we'll have only great music (which is subjective since it's based on the collective thousands of judging sessions) left and then the cuts get brutal because I already know in some categories we could go 50 albums deeps and you wouldn't miss a beat for the nominations and it's even worse for songs. Right now we have zeroed in on about 75% of what is moving to Round 4 with a shot at a nomination. I think about a week from now we'll move into that final difficult round.

We'll be moving all the categories into Round 4 hopefully by the end of the week except Classical and perhaps the Singer-Songwriter categories and 1 or 2 others. We've reviewed the stuff poised to move to Round 4 and some of it is amazing. It's easy to get jaded by stuff that is good but doesn't move you. But I am really loving what I am hearing. We had some industry folks checking out the progress and they were blown away. I just got off a conference call with an giant and awesome company (that I personally love and use) who already wants to work with us to help the nominees and winners get more notoriety. We'll see where that goes, but it's clear that people are getting very excited by what they are hearing and the fact that we have filtered 560K songs already down to 8K is blowing industry folks away who thought something like that could never be done without spending millions of dollars.

It's all good. Now if I could just get some sleep. Got about 4 hours last night but was so worked up about the process that I couldn't stop thinking about it and had to get up. We're getting to the stage where songs play constantly in my mind as I fall asleep and the moment I wake up. I wish I could share what the songs were but I don't want to reveal any info on songs or artists still in the running at this stage.

Could be Americana, could be Country, could be Blues, could be Rock, could be Roots, could be Jam Band, could even be Trad. Folk if it was simple in presentation. We considered having a Southern Rock category, but didn't get many potential candidates among the entries.